Longtime Orange County theatre artist and art critic Dave Barton has wrapped five years as the teaching artist leading Arts Orange County's VOICES: Veterans Storytelling Project, operated in collaboration with Heroes Hall Veterans Museum at the OC Fair & Event Center. Like most live, in-person activities, VOICES pivoted to a virtual platform when the pandemic began. During the past two years, Dave worked with dozens of veterans to tell their stories in self-recorded videos edited for us by Media Arts Santa Ana's Victor Payan. You can access all 32 short videos here. They include veterans sharing and discussing their creative endeavors as artists, actors, writers and musicians, stories of their life before, during and after military service, and much more. The final video is the story of Kenneth R. Barton, who served in the U.S. Air Force from 1952-56 and as a Public Safety Advisor for USAID in Vietnam in 1967-68. Kenneth was Dave's father and he passed away recently, before having had the chance to record his story, and so it is read by Dave.

Segerstrom Center for the Arts has appointed Dr. Natalie Graham as Vice President of Community Engagement. Graham comes to the Center after an accomplished tenure as a faculty member in the Department of African American Studies at California State University, Fullerton where she served as chair of the department and co-founded the Institute of Black Intellectual Innovation. She earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Florida and Ph.D. in American Studies at Michigan State University as a University Distinguished Fellow. A widely published scholar of African American Studies, she is also an award-winning author and performer who has toured nationally. In August 2021, Natalie Graham was appointed Poet Laureate of Orange County. Read more about Dr. Graham here.

Arts Orange County served as consultants to Segerstrom Center for the Arts for this recruitment.

A 14-foot sculpture titled, Coyotl-Coyote, created by Santa Ana artist Larry Gonzalez Rivas has been unveiled at the intersection of Willits and Sullivan Streets in Santa Ana. The sculpture is the first to be commissioned by the city’s Arts & Culture Office. Read more in the Orange County Register article.